Does This Ring Make Me Look Straight?

Thanks to Tito over at Northern Lights for pointing out this fascinating article on MSN. It's about people who identify as gay or lesbian but have found themselves falling in love and in relationships with people of the opposite sex. While that is not exactly my situation--I was in the straight relationship before I completely accepted a gay identity--I relate to most of what the people in the article say.

For example:

[Says] Tricia Johnson, 31, from Philadelphia, "When I first went out publicly with my current boyfriend, I wanted to stand up and say, ‘This isn’t what it looks like! I’m not really straight!’ In my heart, I was starting to wonder who and what I actually was. I felt totally out at sea.”

Particularly after making a bigger deal of coming out than I was comfortable with while FoxyJ and I were separated, I find myself feeling very self-conscious of the wedding band on my finger lately. What will my friends think? Will they assume I've joined the ex-gay camp? Will they think I've become (or gone back to being) a repressed closet freak? Or will they think I just pretended to be gay in some insane attempt to get attention?

“I felt like a traitor,” says Daniel Wright, 32, from Los Angeles. “I thought, ‘I am going to lose my friends, and I’m going to lose my community.’ It was like coming out all over again.” And it may indeed be hard for your gay friends to accept your new relationship. Dr. Schecter says, “In general, the gay and lesbian community is a minority community. It fights hard to be treated equally. There is strength in numbers, and any potential loss of a member of the community is threatening.” There might also be a perception that a person who enters a heterosexual relationship has taken the “easy way out.”

When Foxy and I got back together, I was especially nervous about telling my gay friends. Despite my fears, though, I'm happy to say that every one of them responded with love and encouragement. My friends, regardless of their orientation or political values, are happy so long as I'm happy. Perhaps I'd do well to follow their example in the way I perceive myself.

Telling family members about your new relationship can have complications of its own, particularly if they were not accepting of your gay identity. Samantha Lewis, 37, from Providence, RI, says, “The religious members of my family were ecstatic. They never fully accepted me for who I was. It was just another slap in the face.”

I felt this too after announcing Foxy's and my reunification. I was wary of overly-zealous expressions of congratulations because, happy as I was to be back with my wife, I read the well-meaning felicitations of my more conservative family and friends as signs that they had been waiting on the edges of their seats for me to come to the light and realize I'd never be happy as a gay man. This turned what should have felt like feelings of victory into feelings of defeat. I can't honestly blame the family or friends who were sincerely happy for me, though--it's me who chooses to interpret everything as judgment, who sets up a false binary wherein one of us is the victor and the other defeated.

As a gay person in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, you might struggle to find an appropriate label. Does this mean that you’re straight or bisexual? Can you be dismissed as a “hasbian” or “yestergay”? In the end, your identity is something that only you can define. Dr. Schecter says, “There are people who retain lesbian identity while in a committed relationship with a man. Others do not. Identity is shaped by individual meaning.” Your current situation also does not invalidate your past relationships or mean that you are or were “going through a phase.” Tricia Johnson says, “I struggled for so long with what to call myself. Eventually I thought why do I have to have a label? My experience is more complex than a single word.”

Labels? Me? Never. Say what you want to about the inadequacy of labels, but it's a natural human tendency to name things and to group together things that have shared qualities. It also happens to be a natural human tendency upon which my chosen career is based. What do you do, then, when there is no name, when all the available names seem to describe things that share some of your qualities, but not all of them? Either you reject the human tendency to label as futile and destructive, or you make a new label. I've opted for the latter approach. While transorientation may never catch on outside the realm of this blog, I maintain that it's a healthy step in my process of navigating largely uncharted territory, and I suspect that some of my fellow travelers described in this MSN article would benefit from a similar addition to their ideological lexicon.

At any rate, it's good, as always, to be reminded that FoxyJ and I are not alone in this.

Out Again

Admissions Coworker decided that the best way for me to come out to my friends in Seattle was to have a coming out party. So I gave her the email addresses of my library coworkers (not everyone who works in the library, just the seven other student reference specialists) and she sent them and the three other graduate student readers at admissions an Evite with the following message:

Dear Friends of Ben,

He's Here, He's Queer - Get Used to It!
Or...join us in drinking to it!

The Grad Readers Club requests the honor of your presence at Ben's official nobody-in-Seattle-knows-I'm-gay coming out party. Come prepared to drink plenty of beer (or a Shirley Temple for the recovering addicts, ex-BYU students, and those with a bun in the oven) and make witty comments. Extra points for those of you who come bearing gifts AND witticisms.

And thus I was outed to all my coworkers. I worried the message was a little more... confrontational? than I would have worded it, but no one seemed bothered by it and the important thing is that I didn't have to do it myself.

Last night we all got together at Dad Watson's and had a great time. Plenty of beer was drunk and many witty comments were made. One of my library coworkers brought a gift--three glow-in-the-dark rubber duckies with devil horns (she promised there was no message implied here) that I was happy to bring home and share with S-Boogie and Little Dude. My gayness was mentioned a couple times during the night (mostly when people joked that they weren't sure what the appropriate thing to say was: Congratulations? Happy Birthday?) but it was hardly the focus of the party, which is just how I'd like things to be. I was very happy to feel that my friends know I'm gay and it really means nothing to them--they care only that I find happiness, whatever that means for me. I was certainly not surprised to get this reaction from my friends, particularly here in Seattle, nor does it differ all that much from the reaction I've gotten from friends and family in Utah and Hawaii over the past ten years, but it's still nice. And nice is good.

Is There No Drinking Fountain in This Closet?

Friday night I made up for the two missed opportunities I had blogged about Friday morning.

To the library coworker who had referred to me remarrying [a woman], I sent an email explaining that while she had not said anything unreasonable, I felt bad because I had not corrected her. I acknowledged that she surely didn't care about my sexual orientation, but that this was more for my sake than for hers. She emailed me back Saturday morning and thanked me for sharing and invited me to go out for coffee some time.

To the admissions coworker who had remarked at my not having kissed anyone until 21, I sent an email just sort of randomly saying, "Oh, by the way, I'm gay." I felt confident in doing so largely because she is also gay--not that this makes her any more accepting than my other coworkers [as she later said, "Being gay is more normal than you think. I mean, people think it's more normal than you think. Especially here. I mean, it's like, boring to be gay in Seattle."], but that she's done the whole coming out thing before so I hoped she'd understand my compulsion to tell people what in theory should not matter enough to tell. She did. She invited me to go out for a drink some time.

Tonight Admissions Coworker emailed because she had outed me to two other coworkers and she wasn't sure if I would be upset. The truth is that I had wanted her to spread the word, because that spares me having to make a big deal of it. This way, people know, if it comes up, it comes up, if it doesn't, it doesn't, and we can all proceed with life. She was glad to know I wasn't angry, and suggested we all--the five graduate student admissions readers and anyone else I want to come out to--go out for drinks.

Apparently the thing to do when one comes out of the closet is to have beverages of one kind or another. The funny thing is that I hate coffee and, having never drunk alcohol nor felt the need to, I'm not too anxious to start now. That doesn't stop me from going out with friends and, while they drink the beverage of their choice, having a Shirley Temple or something. Which Admissions Coworker finds amusing, I think, but that's okay. I find myself amusing too.

In and Out, Out and In

When I moved to Seattle, I more or less went back in the closet. This wasn't a conscious decision; it just happened. Thanks to the internet, Dialogue, and the local media, everyone in Utah knows I'm gay. In Seattle, though, my fame is not exactly widespread. Telling people here that I'm gay would have required just that--telling them--and the truth is that I haven't done that in years. To write an essay or a blog post and let people read it or not read it as they see fit is much more passive and therefore more my style than forcing an "I'm gay" into casual conversation. And casually mentioning it would have required me to explain that yes, I am married, but no, I'm not some over-repressed religious zealot out to protect "traditional" marriage.

You'd think that it would be easier to slip it in now that I'm getting divorced.

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear about your divorce. Why are you getting divorced?"

"Because I'm gay."

The reality, though, is that no one would be so rude as to ask why I'm getting divorced. It's sort of a personal question and most people respect those kinds of social boundaries. I've had several opportunities in the last couple days to come out to various friends, but I have a hard time doing it.

"Wow, you didn't have your first kiss until you were 21? Were you really shy?"

No, I could have said, I just wasn't particularly interested in girls, and boys weren't an option because I was Mormon. Instead, I shrugged and said, "I guess."

"It'll be interesting to see how your kids react when and if you remarry, if your new wife wants to have more kids."

Yes, I could have said, I'm not sure whether I want to have more kids, but if I remarry that's something my husband and I will have to work out. Instead I made a strange guttural noise and a funny face.

The problem is that I have two conflicting values here: the first is that I really do want my friends to know that I'm gay. No, it's not who I am, but it's an important part of who I am and I'd like for my friends to know me well enough to know the important parts. On the other hand, I don't want to force the important parts of me onto my friends. I don't want to force myself on anyone. And at the same time, I don't want my sexuality to appear as important to me as it probably really it is.

I think I just need a t-shirt that says HI, I'M GAY, and I'll wear it to school and work for a week or two until everyone knows without me having to tell them.